After last year’s stint at the Himalayas Centre in Pudong, World Chocolate Wonderland is back in Shanghai with a new location in Shanghai Indoor Stadium. A vast variety of chocolate sculptures, artwork and even couture is exhibited at the World Chocolate Wonderland in Chongqing municipality since Dec 30, 2013. The chocolate-themed activity has visited Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung since its start in 2010. This year's activity will run till March 31, 2014.
The Kit Kat Final 50 Art Project
Okay, riddle me this. What does art and chocolate make together?
"SWEET!" Duh.
Yeah, so Kit Kat pulled off this fabulous art project in Australia to 'immortalise' its Final 50 bars of the Limited Edition Kit Kat White Chocolate bars.
Artist Mike Watt was invited to make 50 paintings from 50 bars of Kit Kat Limited Edition White Chocolate bars. Watt crushed and melted the chocolates, giving him 'white chocolate paint' to work with. Check out the video below to see how he did it.
Here are some of Watt's sweet work and you can see all 50 in their FB album.
Welsh woman bags 'chocolate taster' job
There's actually a job of a 'chocolate taster' and this woman has it! Jane Ballinger, from Glyn Ceiriog, Wrexham, beat 77,000 contestants to win the post of 'honorary chocolate taster' for Cadbury for a year. Much like Charlie in the chocolate factory, Jane will get a year's chocolate supply for free and will be consulted for taste before Cadbury's innovations are released to the public.
Denis Karaca winner of Chocolate Masters Asia Pacific Selection
Australian chef Denis Karaca took home the top honours at the World Chocolate Master Asia Pacific round. The World Chocolate Masters is an initiative of the three leading gourmet chocolate brands, Callebaut, Cacao Barry and Carma. Karaca was followed by second place Lei Fu Veng from Macau at the competition, that was held in Taipei. Both Chefs won a full travel package to compete in the World Finals which will be held in Paris between 28th and 30th October 2013.
Sixteen freshmen from Israel's Holon Institute of Technology made this portrait of the POTUS or the President of the United States, Barack Obama recently. Made using 1172 'pixels' of white, milk and dark chocolate, this portrait is a recreation of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign poster. The students presented Obama with this work of art along with a letter saying their lives too were "full of dreams and hopes" in the context of Israel's (perpetual) unrest. Well, now that's a sweet way of driving home a point! (Source)
Epic Meal Time, the new instructional cooking show whipped up this crazy all-chocolate breakfast that clocks in 380 gm of fat and 8724 calories! Basically, don't eat for the next two days if you go for this one. The creator chefs mixed in and coated bacon, eggs and potatoes with Nesquik powder, hollowed out sausages to fill them with Hershey's chocolate syrup, pancakes with double fudge chocolate in the batter and the French Toast stuffed with Nutella! The breakfast, of course, has to be washed down with a chocolate milkshake. If this isn't evil, I don't know what is.
This one should be happy news for tea (and of course chocolate) lovers. Newcastle-based twins Jodi and Stella Kean started experimenting with different kinds of teas after their tea bar business failed to take off. Stella told Express, “When the lease on the shop fell through we came up with the idea for choclateas. I don’t think people realise how many calories and how much sugar is in a cup of hot chocolate. We wanted to create something that felt like a treat but was healthy .”
“The main taste you get is tea, followed by the undertone of the flavour, such as pure dark chocolate and cocoa powder in the traditional-style choclatea,” Stella continued. Each cup has less than 20 calories, and other flavours in this range include chilli chocolate, peppermint chocolate, vanilla chocolate and wild berry chocolate. The range will be launched in the UK next month.
Have your God and eat him too! At least the Brahmakumaris of Ahmedabad must have had something like that in mind when they decided to make this gigantic Shivling on Shivratri this year. The 17 ft. tall, 56 ft. wide structure has been entered into the Limca Book of records for being the largest ever chocolate Shivlinga. It weighs nearly 600 kgs and took six days to make. The installation was kept for three days for the festival and then broken and distributed to kids as prasad.
In the meantime, sculptor Elena Kliment has created an entire room of chocolate in Minsk, Belarus. The 20 sq. m. room was created with 600 kg of chocolate and everything in the room, from the walls to the carpets to the furniture to the decoration is made of fine Belgian chocolate. The creation took two months to make and is part of an installation at a mall. It will be open to visitors till April 14, 2013, after which small pieces will be cut off and distributed.
However, this is not the first time such a masterpiece has been created. In February 2011, Mindaugas Tendziagolskis used 660lb of chocolate to design a chocolate dining room in Vilarus in Lithuania.
And if worshiping chocolate gods and swooning in chocolate rooms isn't enough for you, you could go all out and opt for a chocolate cruise. yes! There are entire cruises dedicated to chocolate like this one by AMAWaterways to be held in April 2014, starting in Prague. Hosted by acclaimed American chocolatier Norman Love, this cruise aboard the AmaCerto features chocolate-making demonstrations, lectures and tastings, capped off with an ultra extravagant grand finale. It is the perfect cruise for chocolate lovers!
Notice how everything just spelt in French becomes so much sexier? Even if it is as plain as the words chocolate lamp. Well, the La Lumiére Au Chocolat is just that. Not the most brilliant of designs, now is it? But there are chocolate mad people like me in the world, who make things like this.
This, La Lumiére Au Chocolat here was made by Alexander Lervik and was unveiled at the Stockholm Design Week at the Lightworks Exhibition. Lervik wanted to create a lamp concept that started with complete darkness and decided upon his favourite foodstuff as the medium.
When first turned on, the lamp gives no light (duh!), and only after the first few minutes do the first rays start to emerge. As the chocolate melts with the heat of the bulb, light begins to shine through, mimicking the rising of the sun. Eventually, the whole lamp melts, and on cooling down, the chocolate forms blocks at the base, which can then be eaten!
The shape of the lamp has been devised based on extensive testing involving the melting process. “The lamp was initially cube-shaped, but once we determined how chocolate melts, we modified the shape to resemble a cut-off pyramid,” says Alexander in Design Milk.
Uh... I dunno dude. I'd much rather eat my chocolate blocks from packets and get my light from within glass cases. I'm old fashioned like that.
The 8th Annual For the Love of Chocolate Gala that was held on the February 23rd by French Pastry School had a fancy Old Hollywood themed chocolate-y regalia with the Dessert Dance Party and the dramatic apex of the evening, the Cocoa Couture Fashion Show! Sexy, eh?
What's better than beer? Chocolate beer. What's better than chocolate beer? Drinking it in an edible chocolate cup. Aye, chocoficionados. Japanese brewery Sankt Gallen, have introduced this genius of an idea with their Imperial Chocolate Stout. The cup aims to counteract the bitterness of the stout, is stable at room temperature and can withstand at least five beers. I want!
And a Nicholas guy somewhere on this planet made this fabulous resume, printing it on the packaging of a chocolate bar and got the job. Like, obviously! The image surfaced recently on Imgur
The new chocolate zealot me was surfing the net for chocolate (since the GM dieter me couldn't eat any), when I came across this amazing slideshow on Artinfo.com that has 14 delicious Works of Chocolate Art. While all 14 are unique, I wanted to share two striking works with my readers. Braunes Bad (Brown Bath) by Sonja Alhäuser
German artist, Sonja Alhäuser works primarily with edible sweets to bust that notion of immortality of art. Very often she invites guests to her show to bite off pieces of her art work! At a particular show in 2009, she actually bathed in a tub of chocolate and, in installations of the same work, guests were free to dive in as well. Boy, I'd have liked to do that!
You can't have your cake and eat it too by Leandro Erlich
In another artwork from 2009, Argentinian artist, Leandro Erlich created this incredibly life-like replica of the world-famous Barcelona style couch out of angel food cake and oodles of chocolate! The leather-like finish of the couch was created with chocolate and looked so real that guests at the American Patrons of Tate's Haunch of Venison Cake Party must have had real difficulty deciding whether to eat it or sit on it. Sweet, sweet dilemma!
Ever lusted after a pair of Christian Louboutin heels, thinking they were pretty enough to eat? Now you can. Well, almost. Andrea Pedraza, a Dallas-based chocolatier has combined her love of chocolate and high heels in an interesting enterprise. She carefully fills gourmet chocolates in moulds and uses exquisite red ganache to create the red soles of the shoes - much like a real life CL pair.
And while it is women who are usually hooked on to shoes, her majority clientele for chocolate heels is surprisingly male. Prices start at $35 per shoe. They can be gifted just like that in beautiful boxes, or be filled with more chocolates! Well, men who gift their sweethearts beautiful edible chocolate shoes this Valentine's Day are sure to meet with success... ahem later in the evening.
Yup! That's a life-sized chocolate Bruce Willis alright! That the likeness is not great is quite another matter. The Japs went all out during a movie promotion for A Good Day to Die Hard and wheeled out a bigass chocolate statue of John McClane, the protagonist of the film, during a press conference.
Since the movie opens on Valentine's Day, this chocolate statue was made the highlight of the event. If you ask me, all movie promotions ought to be done like this - Valentine's Day or not. And if they give me that chocolate gun, I'll even promise it good press. ;)
Fancy a life-sized chocolate car, a chocolate 'Terracotta' army, or Eiffel and Pisa towers of chocolate? Not good enough for you? How about a chocolate Mona Lisa or a chocolate David by Michelangelo? These huge works of chocolate art bear testimony to how chocolate manufacturers of the world are going completely crazy trying to break into the Chinese market.
Close on the heels of the Chocolate Wonderland Show in January, the rival Chocolate Happy Land Exhibition (yeah, the Chinese and their English) is being held in Shanghai now. Both shows are held in the prime gift-giving occasions of the Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day. The Chocolate Happy Land exhibition boasts edible re-creations of world-renowned icons of refinement, glamour and heritage, from a giant Mona Lisa and Marilyn Monroe to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Winged Victory of Samothrace.
With shows like these, manufacturers hope to tap into the gifting traditions of the Chinese, if not their non-existent sweet tweet. Say organisers, I got a huge sweet tooth. Keep my invite ready for the next year, yes?
I saw this piece of Oreo art this morning on my Twitter feed (via @mujib), and knew immediately that this blog had to feature some chocolate art too! The artist is Judith G. Klausner and the world needs more people like her, for it definitely made my day. :)
